Messaging and collaborative software has increasing importance in the workplace. Software that allows users to schedule their work commitments and communicate such scheduling effectively and efficiently to other participants can promote work productivity by removing administrative burden from the users. IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino architecture (IBM Lotus Notes and Domino are trade marks of International Business Machines Corporation) provides such software which connects and integrates users' resources including email, calendars and schedules, journals, to do lists, Web pages and databases.
Users, in the course of a working day, can receive invitations to many events. Inevitably some of them will coincide and the user will only be able to accept the invitation to one of them. Again, inevitably some of the events to which a user accepts an invitation will be cancelled or rescheduled. When a event is cancelled or rescheduled the user is free to accept a different invitation at that particular time. A problem arises in selecting a previously declined event.
To take an example, a user receives invitations to a number of meetings which are scheduled for a Thursday at 2 pm. One of the invitations is from the user's manager. This meeting being a priority the user accepts the manager's invitation and declines all others. Some time before the manager's meeting the user receives a mail from their manager rescheduling the meeting for a later date. The Thursday 2 pm time slot is now free for any of the other meetings previously declined.
The problem for the user is knowing what other events are now available for the freed time slot. At this stage a user has probably forgotten what other invitations he had received. The event invitations may be buried deep in the user's mail file and the user would have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for them. The declined invitations may have been deleted from the mail file and so the user is no longer aware of what events he is now free to attend.
Conventional art can mark invitations as declined but cannot prompt the user that such invitations can be reactivated when a particular time slot becomes free.
Currently, users may tentatively accept invitations to all events knowing that some are likely to be cancelled or rescheduled. Users do this so that they do not forget that other events are available should one of them be cancelled or rescheduled. However, this is not a good scheduling practice and leads to confusion and last minute cancellations of attendance at previously accepted events.